A521.5.8.RB_McNerneyLeigh

As the Eastern Region Financial Aid Counselor it is my responsibility to award roughly 1,600 financial aid recipients year round. I have around 63 campuses and the numbers are climbing every year. With this tremendous responsibility I have developed my own personal objectives that I would like to accomplish. One objective is to increase my customer service to my students and give them a more personal experience. I value having a better relationship with my students because to me each student is an individual with different aspirations and dreams. Every one of them struggles with their own battles and challenges daily. If a student is applying for financial aid it is not because they want to collect loan debt it’s because they have no other options. These students want to attend college no matter what situation they might be in.

Our students come to us for guidance and help attaining the funds needed to attend college and better themselves. Treating these students as a faceless number or email address really takes a toll on delivering the customer service they deserve, but being in charge of 1,600 plus students makes this objective unattainable as I am only one person and there are only 24 hours in the day. Since we are a Worldwide University we are all over the world. My eastern region campuses start in Florida and travel all the way up to the New Jersey and as far west as Indiana so this makes it impossible to develop the kind of relationship necessary to fulfill all my regions student’s needs.

I was faced with a conflict that arose due to our lack of customer relationships more specifically our lack of delivering better customer service to communicate what information we need from our students. We depend on technology to link the student to us and this can be quite the challenge. A lot of the other departments within the Worldwide Headquarters correspond with student via their personal emails, however with the sensitive documentation the Financial Aid Department is required to use a secured email address to protect our student’s information. This inconsistency presents many challenges and here is one that I experienced most recently.

I had a student that was selected for verification by the Department of Education and we were required to review the student’s federal tax return, a Verification Worksheet and Financial Aid Status form before we could award him financial aid. Since all correspondence was sent to the student’s Ernie email account it was the student’s responsibility to check this email for more information regarding their financial aid account. Well this student was a transfer student unaware of this and was getting frustrated because he felt that the Financial Aid Department was “taking advantage” of our students and not processing any of their requests. He was contacting our call center and not getting through to me, his Financial Aid Counselor, which posed the main problem because he wasn’t getting the information he needed to resolve his issue.

Once he finally reached me he was beyond upset and threatened to quit the University completely because of the lack of service. It took a lot of patients to calm this student down as he was screaming at me for not being able to process his requests. Once he was finished getting everything that was bothering him off of his chest I learned that the student had recently lost his job, was getting divorced and was depending on using his financial aid not only for classes but his living expenses as well. He was behind on rent and basically felt like his whole world was crumbling around him. He didn’t know to check his Ernie email and when he did he didn’t understand what to do because he had never been selected for verification before. My heart went out to him and his struggles. I went out of my way to attend to his financial aid needs and I was able to process his verification within the day, set his awards up and monitored it until his corrections were reviewed by the Department of Education. His financial aid disbursed into his account 5 days later relieving some of his stressors. 

Although I felt a sense of satisfaction in completing this students financial aid requests and I was able to retain him as a student I wasn’t happy that the student that was going through all of that turmoil and on top of that got so upset with the financial aid service he received. As the counselor it is my responsibility to manage the accounts and deliver great customer service and this instance I wasn’t able to until he was almost beyond consolable.

In order to prevent these instances from reoccurring the Director of Financial Aid conducts quarterly training for all of our call service representatives which has reduced many obstacles. We also remind students via technology services that the Financial Aid Department corresponds with students via their Ernie email. We send text alerts to student’s phones, state this on our website and this is also something the campuses are informing the students. Although these ways of communicating have helped, in my opinion the personal customer service is still lacking.

I would like to add a Skype option for our students at all of our campuses. To me this would better develop our communications with students because they could see and hear what we are trying to communicate with them. If I could talk to a student and see them and go through their account this would better serve their needs thus improve our customer service and promote a more personal experience between the students and their counselors. Obviously not every student requires this type of service however for the ones who do it would be available for them to use.